Breaking Through August – Case 2008 Stats

Yet another month has passed and again I’ll share the statistics with you. As you might recall I was really amazed by the progress that my case site www.petinsurancepro.com had in July and to be quite honest I didn’t expect to see anything like it in August.

Before I will go into further detail with traffic and income I would like to start with the plan I had forÂ August when I wrote the July monthly update. Let me list them here in bullet form and then dive a little deeper into some of them.

Onpage optimization

Article distribution

Blogs post using ghost writers

Opt-in improvement

Multiple language feature

Some onpage optimization

As for onpage optimization I didn’t take it as far as I wanted to. I did spend some time on three significant articles (the ones optimized for my three main keywords) but the rest of them were left almost untouched. The good thing about that is that there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Article distribution

The plan was to post even more articles than I did in July (14) but I had some difficulties with one of the writers so it ended up with 10 article submissions. So far these 10 articles have been viewed by 1,586 people or almost 160 times per article. These articles will keep getting visitors and send me visitorsÂ while branding the websiteÂ +Â add some one-way links to the site.

Ghost writers for blog posts

In mid August a deal was made with a ghost writer to do daily blog posts to the site. ThisÂ will beÂ a significant increase in the number of posts as the last couple of months have had 10-15 posts per month. I felt that it was time to speed up the process as content is a big part of what will increase the potential Adsense income.

This result of this deal will be that blog posting will be totally hands off (I will monitor the process in the first few months until everything runs smoothly). Over time I expect to employ more writers so that the site can grow even faster and so that I will not be too dependent on just one writer.

Opt-in is a challenge

If you have visited the site in the last 30 days you will have seen that I have tried a lot of different types of opt-in options. Currently there is no opt-in box and that is mainly because I had to remove it because it wasn’t good for my Adsense income and I haven’t had the time to test other options. I am planning on trying out a pop-up box when people are leaving the site but I’m not sure that’ll be the best long term solution.

Multiple Languages

Now this was one feature that I had (and still have) high hopes for. I bought a plugin that would help translate and cache the site in a lot of different languages but even though I have had help from several sources (even from the guy who made it) it still leaves me with a 404 errorÂ for the translated pages. If anyone reading this knows about twisting advanced plugins please contact me as I am desperate to get this to work.

August Stats

As you might remember I changed the way that I had setup the Adsense boxes on the site and I had a CTR of about 7-8% in JulyÂ that ended up paying me $76 which I found to be really great as that would be able to cover almost the entire ghost writing process. Kontera brought in $18 in July which in total had the site send me $94 for the entire month. Not a fortune but still better than the month before.

Adsense

Now I was very excited to see how the month of August would perform as I thought that July was pretty good. The site managed to keep the click through rate even though I removed Adsense from the front page as I felt that it made the site look a little too spammy.

Where July had an average income of $2.45 per day the month of August ended up giving me $5.34 per day which is an increase of more than 100%. As the CTR remained the same thisÂ was mainlyÂ due to an increase in traffic (I’ll get to that in a bit) along with a better quality of ads and thereby a higher payout per click.

In total Adsense for PetInsurancePro paid me $165.65 in August. There were a lot of fluctuations over the course of the month ranging from $0 (August 1st ““ bad start!!) to $20.21 (August 26th). That is just the way it is with Adsense but where I previously was excited when the site hit $10 in a day I now expect it to hit $20 and anything less than that is only considered (fair). I’m sure that there are people out there feeling the same way when they have a bad $2,000 Adsense day. I can’t wait to have bad days like that *lol*

Kontera

The funny thing is that I haven’t been paying much attention to Kontera in August but as with Adsense I have seen a pretty good increase in income as it went from $17.96 in July to $30.35 in August. Again this was mainly due to an increased amount of traffic and a small increase in both the CTR and the eCPM.

As Adsense and Kontera are the only two things that have brought in some money (I am trying out some affiliate products also but still no sale) the total for August is $196. It is not a fortune but if I can keep this pace up it is beginning to look quite good.

Traffic

The main objective for Case 2008 was to prove that I were able to get 1,000 visitors to the site per day and I have to admit that I amÂ somewhat behind schedule. As you can see from the chart below the site had an increase of 42% compare to July.

This means that the percentage of the increase was less than the 45% between June and July but in absolute numbers the increase was 522 visitors (June to July was 408 visitors). The increase in page views was almost 62% which means that people are starting reading more pages which is great.

As for the increase in pages registered by MSN it is mainly due to the translation plugin that I have been testing. At least part of it seems to work.

Ranking

I have only focused on three keywords and the plan was to get all of them into the top 3 in Google. I’ve done a little change in the site structure trying to let more “linkjuice” flow to those specific pages as well as linking from the distributed articles to these three pages with the proper anchor text.

Unfortunately the Shoemoney Serps Tool is no longer free and I have therefore lost the ability to check the ranking using the same tools as I have done the previous months.

Instead I have decided to use the free software called “Free Monitor for Google” developed by CleverStat. Not only will this help me test a whole bunch of keywords simultaneously but it will also let me test on different geographical regions. This means that I will have to leave out Yahoo and MSN data but since more than 60% of my traffic is from Google that is by far the most significant source.

When testing for the US (which the main part of my traffic comes from) this is what I get:

As you can see I have added a few additional details to the picture. In the following months I will continue to work on the 3 keywords in the top but I will also start working on the three new keywords. I have also added the estimated daily traffic according to the free Wordtracker tool but they can only be used as a guideline.

You might wonder why I have chosen to target a keyword like “banfield pet insurance” when Wordtracker states that there are only 2 people searching for that per day.

The site’s Google Analytics stats shows that in the month of August there were 111 visitors to the site that had searched for that term (which is almost 4 per day). Since the site is in the fifth position then according to AOL the site is getting 8.5 times less traffic than the top ranking site (which in this case happens to be the Banfield Pet Hospital).

The top ranking site can therefore expect to receive at least 34 visitors per day for that term (which means that Wordtracker is WAY OFF).

Plans for September

In the following month I will keep doing what I have been doing so far. The ghost writer deal should fall into place so that I don’t have to spend time adding new articles to the site. I will be working on a similar deal with another writer to post articles to Ezinearticles and iSnare so that I won’t have to spend time doing that either.

As stated above I’ll start trying to rank for the three new keywords while working on other types on link- and traffic-building with Squidoo and Hubpages and probably also look into Yahoo answers to see whether that could drive some traffic.

Finally I might start to think about a re-design of the site but that will not be until I have spend some time creating a plan for what the site should evolve into in the next 12-18 months. Adsense is great but I am positive that I would be able to make even more money selling affiliate products or even my own products. But I haven’t gotten that far in my thinking yet.

Hi Søren, I believe I have tried Aron’s tool some time ago but I might give it another look. From what I can read both tools are pretty fast and hands off so I might end up using both. Thanks for the heads up.

No, I didn’t see your latest comment on that post – that was the kind of info I was looking for. (Although it would be even more interesting to see a “detailed curve” on your earnings on the HyperVRE sites. Perhabs the info is already here if I look close enough )

Do you have any other projects (internet income in some way worth considering) worth mentioning (which are not made with HyperVRE) ?

I’ll see if I can find the time to create a more detailed future post about how the automated sites are performing.

As for other projects I try to keep focus (that was the point of Case 2008) but somehow I always manage to have a few other things going. However I think I would rather not disclose the other projects at this point

If things go as planned I’ll likely be posting about them at this blog at a later stage.

While I often slap around online marketers that promote branding services, there is one area where you can establish a branding element. This area is known as article publication and distribution. Traditionally, this marketing strategy has been used as part of a search engine optimization strategy, but it works for branding as well.